The present invention refers to a combination of a load cell and a tubular insert for mounting in a bore in a machine component, e.g. a bore in a bearing housing wall.
In different situations it is of Interest to measure the load acting on a bearing housing or another comparable machine component. Such a situation is at hand for instance in an ore crusher in a mine, where lumps of rock are fed into the crusher and then during rotation of the substantially tubular crusher body is disintegrated into smaller fractions. In such an ore crusher, which is supported for rotation about its longitudinal axis in bearings arranged in bearing housings, a continuous monitoring of the load acting upon the bearings can be used for controlling the operational conditions of the ore crusher and also for controlling the charging of the ore crusher with rock material to be treated.
For this and similar purposes it has been used load cells mainly in form of strain gauges for determining such bearing load. Such a load cell is for instance a sensor marketed by Wesmar AB, Sweden under the name GOZINTA, although there are other examples on load cells appropriate for the task. The GOZINTA load cell has to be pushed into a bore with a very narrow fit, which furthermore makes mounting and dismounting difficult.
During tests it however has been found that the existing solutions give very low output signals, which is believed to be a result of low tension between the load cell and the wall of the measuring object surrounding it.